1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates, in general, to portable electronic devices such as handheld video game consoles or systems, and, more particularly, to methods and components for operating portable electronic devices such as video game consoles as music players or jukeboxes.
2. Relevant Background
The portable electronics industry has experienced explosive growth in recent years with consumers often owning several such devices. For example, a typical consumer may have a cell phone, a portable computer such as a laptop or notebook computer, a personal digital assistant, a digital music device, and a video game console, and anyone who has traveled recently will have noticed that many people carry and use one or more of each of these portable electronic devices. Most of these devices are battery powered and can only be used for several hours without recharging or replacement of the battery. The electronics industry continues to add features and functionality to the portable devices, but each added feature or function has the potential of shortening the life of the device's battery. Hence, there is an ongoing challenge in the portable electronics industry to provide innovative devices that can operate off their batteries for longer periods of time.
To this end, significant research and development efforts have gone into developing improved batteries. Rechargeable batteries such as lithium ion batteries are typically used in electronic devices, and the service life of a fully charged battery has been extended from several hours to six to ten hours or more. Additional research likely will continue to increase the service life of the batteries used in portable electronic devices, but such improvements are often counterbalanced by added features that use more power and drain the battery such as the addition of a second screen, providing additional processors or memory devices, and the inclusion of parallel or background operation modules or components rather than a single functioning device.
Another approach to increasing the service life of a battery-powered device is to reduce its power usage. For example, many portable electronic devices provide a graphical user interface (GUI) on a monitor or screen, and operation of such screens uses significant power. To reduce power usage, the device may be configured to enter a sleep or power saving mode after a period of non-use or no user input, and in such a sleep mode the GUI may no longer be displayed and the screen darkened to save power. Similarly, many portable electronic devices are adapted to enter a sleep or power saving mode of operation when the device is closed. Additionally, other portable electronic devices enter sleep mode through either a timeout function after a period of inactivity or can enter a user initiated sleep mode by pressing a button or touching a touch screen. For example, devices such as computers and cell phones with a clamshell body design may be configured to automatically enter a sleep mode when the lid portion is folded or snapped shut against the base portion. Likewise, popular video game consoles are provided with clamshell body designs and are typically designed to enter a sleep mode when the lid portion is closed against the base portion. In such a sleep mode, an operating game application saves its current settings and pauses all operations including terminating any display on its screen(s), and game developers have often been required by console manufacturers to provide such pausing of all game routines upon the closing of the body. While saving energy, the requirement that the running application pause during the sleep mode has limited developers' ability to create additional features and functionality for the electronic devices.
Hence, there remains a need for portable electronic devices or software/hardware components for such devices that allow the electronic devices to consume less power and have longer service or battery lives while providing additional functions or operating modes in such devices.